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Introduction to the Afd )ORULGD6WDWH8QLYHUVLW\/LEUDULHV 2020 The Rise of the AfD: An Analysis of Media Narratives & Tropes Brendan S Gerdts Follow this and additional works at DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected] 1 THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES THE RISE OF THE AFD: AN ANALYSIS OF MEDIA NARRATIVES & TROPES By BRENDAN GERDTS A Thesis submitted to the Department of Modern Languages & Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in the Major Degree Awarded: Spring, 2020 2 The members of the Defense Committee approve the thesis of Brendan Gerdts defended on April 15th, 2020. ______________________________ Dr. Birgit Maier-Katkin Thesis Director ______________________________ Dr. Avery Henry Outside Committee Member ______________________________ Dr. Christian Weber Committee Member 3 Table of Contents Thesis Statement ......................................................................................................................................... 4 Introduction to the AfD .............................................................................................................................. 6 Introduction to the New York Times and Deutsche Welle ........................................................................ 8 2017 Bundestag Election ........................................................................................................................... 11 2018 Bavarian State Elections .................................................................................................................. 16 2019 Thuringian Election ......................................................................................................................... 22 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................. 27 4 Thesis Statement Since its beginning in February 2013, the AfD has disrupted established German politics and experienced a great deal of scrutiny by the public (Goerres et al. 246). Worried about repeating the past, German politics and parliamentary discussions have experienced heightened awareness toward the rise of the far right and the tropes associated with ultra-conservative discourse and party programs. As the AfD gains more seats in state and national government its rise has caught the attention of the German public as well as the international community. To capture the narrative discourse about the AfD outside of Germany in the US, this study examines selected media reporting. Since it is beyond the scope of this thesis to look at every news outlet in America and Germany that reports on the rise of the AfD, two news outlets that are geared toward the American public have been selected. Specifically, the reporting by the German news outlet Deutsche Welle to English and German speaking audiences and by the New York Times, a major media outlet in America geared toward an English-speaking audience. This allows-by example-to explore two media representation of the AfD outside of Germany by both a German and American source. Whereas the New York Times primarily reports to an American audience and is based in New York - a diverse city with significant minority influences including a sizable Jewish community, the Deutsche Welle is sponsored by the German government and reports to a more global audience that shows interest in German and European affairs. In both cases, the reporting from these news outlets is widely available to American audiences through the Internet and in the New York Times’ case also in print media. As this thesis explores reporting on the rise of the AfD to American audiences, the New York Times and Deutsche Welle provide material to analyze the media responses to the rise of the AfD and offer interesting insight from different 5 perspectives. Media txts are selected from articles published in a six-month period surrounding three separate elections in which the AfD competed: the 2017 Bundestag election, the 2018 Bavarian state election, and the 2019 Thuringian state election. The 2017 Bundestag election was selected since the AfD won seats in the national parliament for the first time. The two state elections were chosen as each election represents a different side of the former East-West divide in Germany; this allows insight into whether the former East and West Germany divide affected the narratives emerging in media about the election. The Thuringian election is also one dealing with what is regarded as one of the more extremist wings of the AfD making it a vital election to focus on. By taking a closer look at narrative strategies and tropes in the New York Times and Deutsche Welle, this analysis examines how the reporting of select stories about the AfD is structured, how these events are covered, what particular aspects about the AfD program, policies, and themes are selected, what concerns are raised, what type of arguments and narrative frames are put forth to represent this aspect of German politics to the American public. This study will uncover how the rise of the AfD is presented to the American public, whether the reporting is diverging or conveys similar narratives in each news outlet, what narrative strategies are employed, and which national topics are propelled. In the following, this thesis will first cover the beginnings of the AfD, then introduce the news outlets Deutsche Welle and New York Times, give a brief introduction to the concepts of narratives and tropes, followed by a detailed analysis of select events and text examples from both news outlets and provide an investigation of the narrative strategy. 6 Introduction to the AfD In February 2013, just a few months before the German federal elections, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was formed by a group of 3 former CDU members: the lawyer Alexander Gauland, the economist Bernd Lucke, and journalist Konrad Adam (Arzheimer 535). They published a manifesto urging Germany to rethink its connection to the European Union (Berning 17). The party program specifically states in its opening stanza, „Wir fordern eine geordnete Auflösung des Euro-Währungsgebietes. Deutschland braucht den Euro nicht“ (Alternative 1; We are calling for the orderly dissolution of the Euro currency zone. Germany does not need the Euro). During its founding years, the AfD focused primarily on economics and distancing Germany from the European Union. However, the focus of the party broadened in the years between the 2013 and 2017 elections ensuring that the party quickly grew into a new political force on the far right of German politics. Carl Berning argues that this transformation turned the AfD into a party that is: Right-wing first in their rejection of individual and social equity and of political projects that seek to achieve it; second in their opposition of the social integration of marginalized groups; and third in their appeal to xenophobia, if not overt racism and anti-Semitism. (Berning 16). One recurring theme in media representation of the AfD is the question how the party fits into the preexisting conservative political discourse in Germany. Since the party is relatively far-right, it could be seen as the “missing link” between established German conservatism and the extreme right (Berbuir et al. 154). The descriptive quality of a “missing link” really speaks to the novel nature of the AfD for modern German politics which is due in part to a history of shunning the far-right. 7 To clarify on the importance of the emergence of the AfD it is important to understand the history of right wing ‘containment’ in Germany. David Art argues in his paper “The AfD and the End of Containment in Germany?,” that Germany has experienced a ‘containment’ of the far right similar to the containment of Communism by America during the Cold War. He even goes so far as to suggest that: Until the recent elections, Germany had executed containment close to perfection. The history of every radical right party in postwar Germany— the National Democratic Party (NPD), the Republikaner, the German People’s Union (DVU), the Schill Party, to name some of the most successful ones—is one of sudden rise, factional infighting, radicalization, and organizational decay. (Art 79). Art notes that previously a variety of somewhat successful German far right parties have all succumb to both internal and external forces that are working against the success of far-right parties. He specifies the importance of factional infighting and organizational decay in the aforementioned article which points to how surprising it is that the AfD found electoral success. While the AfD competed in the 2013 national elections, its success in the 2017 national elections is far more notable. The AfD only won the support of 4.7 percent of the vote in the 2013 elections, but it garnered 12.6 percent of the vote in the 2017 elections which allowed it to enter the Bundestag for the first time (Berning 18). That election catapulted the AfD to the forefront of German politics as it became the third largest party in the Bundestag, but it is important to understand that its support is more concentrated in the Eastern half of Germany with it winning up to 35 percent of the vote in Eastern elections and as low as 5 percent in Western elections (Kellerman 2). Still, its growth in those 4 years is astonishing, but not surprising. The AfD went through a variety of shifts in that time going from
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